


Obscuris vera involvens

by ellieellieoxenfree



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: M/M, Past Sexual Abuse, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 16:35:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13662966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieellieoxenfree/pseuds/ellieellieoxenfree
Summary: It's supposed to be a casual fling and nothing more. Prequel to Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi, et quorum pars magna fui.





	Obscuris vera involvens

**Author's Note:**

> I was gonna write something domestic and functional and I ended up doing an early days retread of bickering and misery. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> The title is, again, from the Aeneid: 'Truth is enveloped by obscurity.'

It’s about sex. It’s just about sex, because it’s always just been about sex. Hartley has never had much in the way of strong romantic models: there were his parents (miserable) and Ronnie and Caitlin (insufferable); he never would have dated any of the nervous high school virgins he gave boarding-school blowjobs to and left to shudder and grin sheepishly and ball up the sheets for the house staff to deal with. Harry isn’t any different. The venue is different; it’s all supply closets and closed-off, dusty rooms filled with the ghosts of S.T.A.R. Labs employees who fled to save their careers and lives in the aftermath. Hartley avoids the rooms where he and Harrison had been: the now-empty glass box of the office, the workroom that had once been Hartley’s own, certain sections of the pipeline where he swears if he squints he can know exactly where they left sweaty handprints. But there’s hardly anything left in S.T.A.R. Labs now; it’s easy enough to find a place where he can get down on his knees or get shoved up against a wall. This is no gentle, loving sex; they both know what they’re there for and they’re rough and perfunctory with each other. It’s not as violent or ugly or painful as it had been with Harrison, but there’s a silent understanding: we’re both here for one thing only, and Hartley will be the one to smirk and clean up the mess. 

He likes that Harry isn’t as controlled as Harrison. It’s why, he imagines, he can do this, that he feels like he’s been given a chance to redo it all but he’ll be the one with the upper hand. He’ll be the one who feels Harry’s hand spasmodically yank his hair when he climaxes and glories in that helpless, hardly-controlled groan of pleasure. Harry hisses profanities between his teeth and it’s enough to make Hartley cum himself. There’s no pretense to this Wells. The things Hartley does to him unravel him. Hartley catalogs every involuntary clutch of his shoulder, every cut-off gasp, every dip when Harry’s knees go a little weaker. This Wells isn’t capable of hurting him like Harrison had. He doesn’t know all the ways to. Hartley twists that to his advantage, uses all the tricks he’s had. He’s good at this and he knows it. There had been enough men before Harrison (and after him, all the ugly, transactional times to keep the rent going) that he knows how to read almost any man and figure out his cravings. He knows Harry’s desperate scrabbling for control and his fear of losing it. He knows there’s a roiling ocean of worry and uncertainty underneath the skin. He doesn’t talk about it — what does he care for Harry’s feelings? — but he gives Harry that veneer of control he wants so badly and in the end, holds all the power just out of reach.

Nobody thinks much of the hours Hartley keeps. He’d always stayed late before and now, with the Zoom threat, of course he still does. What sort of life does Hartley Rathaway keep, anyway? It’s not as though he’d ever gone out with the team before. He’s got a reputation for isolation and needless dedication to being a workhorse. He stays in his workroom until the rest of them leave, Jesse rebelliously tagging along with them, before he stretches and saves his work and meets Harry in one of the rooms where the security cameras have long since stopped focusing. There are times, of course, that they’ve snuck off during daytime hours, but Hartley doesn’t get the same forbidden thrill by it any longer. There had been plenty of times where someone had come so, so, terribly close to finding him and Harrison, but of course he’d never confirm one way or the other. Caitlin, upon his release from the pipeline, had insisted on a medical exam and had inquired about the scars she found, but Hartley had only laughed and asked if she really wanted to hear stories of adolescent hazing from his school days. ‘It’s a blood sport,’ he’d told her, with the sort of leer he knew would shut prim and proper Caitlin up. It had. Now, of course, he feels a slight pang of guilt for it, because he has grown quite fond of her, but there’s not enough guilt in the world that would force him to tell her the truth.

Hartley sets ground rules: that they only meet in the labs, that they keep it strictly work-related when the rest of Team Flash is around, that they never, never tell a soul. He doesn’t like — had never liked — bringing anyone to his apartment. Dorm rooms, other people’s apartments, offices hourly motels, alleys: these are his domain. Besides, he doesn’t feel like running the risk of taking Harry out in public, even for the few brief moments of smuggling him into Hartley’s apartment building; someone will inevitably be getting the mail or bringing home groceries, and short of shoving Harry into a balaclava, there’s no surefire way to hide the face of a psychopathic mass-murderer. Instead, they arrange clandestine meetings around Jesse’s nights out, Hartley vanishing in silence as soon as he’s cleaned up and dressed again. He drives home with the windows down and taps cigarette ash on the car door and feels quite pleased with himself. At work the next day, he’ll be stone-faced while he talks to Harry, thinking of nothing but the expression on Harry’s face as he’d cum the night before, but keeping the conversation decidedly fixed on trajectories and algorithms.

The night Harry kisses him is the night, Hartley thinks, it all starts going to hell. It’s spontaneous, in the heat of the moment, almost accidental, and Hartley jerks back when it happens and stares at Harry in horrified shock. This is in no way formally part of the deal, that something like kissing is off the table, but it’s something that he’s never felt comfortable with. Some of the weepier high school boys had wanted to start with kisses and hesitant explorations of Hartley’s body, and he had tolerated it at first, but it had become too much of a time-consuming chore and he’d pushed their sexual awakening along more quickly by dodging their mouths and moving his own south. Harrison had kissed him, but in a gesture of power, bruising and drawing blood and undoing Hartley’s resolve. What Harrison had wanted from him, of course, Hartley would have done. If Harrison had promised to take him back, Hartley would have crawled on hands and knees over that broken glass he’d left on the floor of Harrison’s home. But Harrison hadn’t. Harrison had disposed of him, and he’d taken with him Hartley’s willingness to humble himself for certain things. Kissing, he realizes now, warily staring at Harry, is one of those things.

Harry seems unperturbed by Hartley’s reaction. ‘Are we getting on with it, or…?’ he says. 

‘Ground rule,’ says Hartley. ‘None of that. Ever.’ He almost wants to wipe his mouth on the back of his hand, but feels it would be too childish.

A sigh. ‘You want to stop?’

Hartley hesitates for a second. Something feels off now — maybe just the memories of Harrison; he knows those can knock him off his feet sometimes — and he doesn’t know if he really wants to continue. ‘Yeah,’ is all he says.

He collects his clothes, fairly bolts for his car, turns the radio up, windows down, taps the cigarette with the frenetic movements of dissatisfaction. He jerks off in the shower and smokes another cigarette out the kitchen window in his underwear, hardly tasting it over the burn of stomach acid in his throat. He’s shaken and upset about the kiss and he can’t articulate why. It’s not the same anger he usually gets when he remembers Harrison. It’s fear, a little bit, he realizes, fear on top of the fury he’d expected, and he doesn’t know what he’s scared of.

—

They don’t meet up for a few days, keeping it strictly professional, but Hartley refuses to let whatever’s gnawing at him win, and he waits for a Friday to clear Team Flash and Jesse out of the labs so he can put a rest to this and get things back to normal. But Barry is having family movie night at Joe’s and Cisco is going out of town for the weekend and Jesse says she’s pretty tired and wants an early night for once, and so Caitlin says she’ll just stay home. Hartley, furious, weighs the merits of breaking another cardinal rule, and finds himself stupidly scrounging through the drawers of one of Caitlin’s medical cabinets for a flu mask. He stays late enough for the gloaming to settle over the city, then finds Harry in a workroom. ‘My place tonight?’ he says, careful to lean over a table and hardly mumble the words above a whisper.

‘You really don’t have much in the way of conviction, do you, Rathaway?’ Harry wipes down a calculation on the whiteboard and scribbles a correction.

‘Do you want to get laid or not?’ Hartley has no time for Harry’s jabs tonight. He shoves the mask across the table. ‘I’ve got an old baseball cap in the car. If you’re coming, you better wear it. I’ve got nosy neighbors and I don’t feel like talking to the cops about why Harrison Wells has risen from the dead.’ He spins on one heel and vanishes from the room, listening for the sound of Harry’s footsteps behind him.

Harry insists on checking in with Jesse first, with a story that he’s checking on a potential meta lead across town, and of course he’s taking precautions not to be discovered but he’ll probably be home late. Hartley waits a safe distance down the hall and sighs, rubbing a spot on his neck that’s gone sore from his cramped position over a screen all day. The whole thing reminds him of all the times he’d had to make excuses for sneaking in the school hallways at 2 am. He’d been terrifically good at putting on an act about his upset stomach and delicate constitution. Harry is less convincing, and Hartley has the suspicion that Jesse knows something is going on. He edges further down the hallway and out of sight, fiddling with the string on the flu mask. Harry had thrust it into his hands before returning to the room he and Jesse share, and Hartley had been uncomfortably aware of the moment their fingers had touched.

He wants to laugh at the sight of Harry decked out in his slipshod disguise — glasses off, hat pulled so low there’s hardly a gap between that and the top of the mask — but he focuses instead on getting home as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. Windows up, no cigarette, radio off. Hartley’s already made up a cover story in case he runs into Mrs. Finch from the third floor, but the building is deserted, and he hustles Harry into his apartment. Harry rips off the disguise and rolls his eyes at Hartley. ‘That was dramatic of you.’

‘Yeah, well, you’re not the only criminal here,’ Hartley snaps. ‘Shoes off. Bedroom’s on the right.’ He’ll feel better afterwards. He’s just annoyed at all the rigamarole that’s surrounded this. He starts shedding clothes on his way down the hallway, ready to get this over with. Lube and condoms in the nightstand drawer, blinds drawn, room scrubbed of too many personal touches. He’s always detested the idea of his surroundings giving too much of himself away. His room is simple, stripped down, basic. Harry casts a glance around at it, but says nothing. He’s still clothed. Hartley sits on the bed and yanks a sock off. ‘Waiting for something?’

‘Mostly for whatever mood you’re in to pass,’ says Harry, but he takes off his shirt anyway. Hartley resolutely looks away from him and focuses on nudging the sock out of the way and into a corner. He always tries to focus less on Harry’s body and more on the act itself. Sex is a means to an end, that’s all. He doesn’t need to think about the rest of it. There’s a mark on the ceiling he always stares at when he can’t sleep, and he focuses on it now, waiting for Harry to get into bed. But he doesn’t, and doesn’t, and doesn’t, for so long that Hartley begins to get restless, and he sighs and sits up. ‘Can you please hurry it up?’ he says, not hiding his irritation.

‘Are you waiting for the executioner?’

‘I’m waiting for you to take your clothes off. If I needed to have uninspiring verbal warfare, I’d call Cisco.’ Hartley is five seconds from taking Harry back to the lab and finding a cheap lay at the White Swallow. Wasted frat boys and long-haul truckers may not be the most skilled partners, but they don’t talk back. 

Harry doesn’t move. ‘Do you even want it?’

‘This again?’ Hartley bends down and reaches for his sock. He’s not going through this territory a second time. They’d discussed it, settled it, and now Harry keeps getting squirrely. ‘Stop playing at morality. We’re both only here for one thing, and you’re the one dawdling. I’ve made my position clear.’ He turns the sock right side out, fully prepared to get dressed and take Harry back down to his car.

Harry shrugs, acquiesces. Hartley removes his glasses and stares at the ceiling while he hears the condom wrapper tear; he shifts himself into position, waiting, strangely anxious. He tries to occupy his mind with calculus equations, simple enough to keep a repetitive rhythm going until he can fully switch over to the rhythm of the movements. It’s rougher than usual, Harry’s hands pinning Hartley down, the force of his thrusts almost angry, and Hartley wants to push him harder and harder, wants it to hurt, wants it to leave a mark. He wants it to be as ugly and as raw as it had been with Harrison. He’s furious with himself, with Harry, for whatever confusion has been dredged up, and he wants this to cause pain. ‘Come on,’ he dares Harry, with that mocking tone he’s perfected over the years. ‘Can’t you do any better than that?’

Now Harry stops. The moment’s gone, and Hartley suppresses a shudder as he feels Harry pulling out. ‘Couldn’t hack it, huh?’ he says. ‘Disappointing.’ Without his glasses, he can’t make out Harry’s expression, but he rubs one eye with the heel of his hand anyway to have an excuse for not looking in Harry’s direction.

Harry stands up, drops the condom in the trashcan. ‘Acting tough for someone who couldn’t handle being kissed.’

‘I didn’t know you were so in need of romantic affirmations. Does it upset you that we never cuddle afterwards, too?’ Hartley reaches for his glasses and rolls out of the bed. ‘If we’re not going to get anywhere tonight, the bathroom is across the hall. Towels in the closet. Best to get back before Jesse worries, isn’t it?’

He feels inexplicably awful about all of this now, a little nauseated and a little shaky. He keeps staring at things around Harry: the doorframe, the edge of the dresser, a shirt balled up and forgotten about on the floor. He digs his nails into his palm to steady himself. He’d had more control with Harrison, for God’s sake. What’s wrong with him now? 

‘You want to call the whole thing off?’ Harry says.

Hartley feels light-headed. He hates all the questions Harry keeps volleying at him. ‘What I want, you couldn’t give me,’ he says, sliding back into the predatory guise he knows so well. ‘You got too cowardly to finish.’ 

It’s a gamble, one he isn’t remotely sure will pay off, but it does, Harry crossing the room and grabbing him by the wrist and shoving him down, all the preparations minimal, the sex even more vicious and uncaring than it’s ever been, two primal forces meeting and clawing at each other and fighting for dominance. Hartley exhales in one long, sibilant noise when Harry cums — a lesson he can’t shake, even now, to hold himself back until the other person climaxes — and he squeezes his eyes closed until there are explosions of light in the darkness and his own orgasm jolts through him. ‘Who’s the cowardly one now?’ Harry says in his ear.

Hartley twists the sheets in his fingers. He’s limp and breathless and he can’t force the laugh out. It takes him a few seconds to be able to speak again. ‘Even mice can roar,’ he says, the words winding him, ‘and sometimes they can be heard, even by the lions.’ He’s conscious of how close Harry is to him right now, how easy it would be for them to touch. He briefly wishes they would. 

‘Which one are you?’

‘Don’t play pop psychologist,’ Hartley says. ‘I’m getting a shower.’ He wants to lie here a while longer, catching his breath, feeling the heat shared between them, but he needs to escape before he gets too caught up in the emotional morass. 

‘What philosopher on your earth said, ‘Don’t start what you can’t finish?’ Harry’s voice is blurred by drowsiness. Hartley ignores him and vanishes into the bathroom.

Just sex, he tells his reflection in the mirror. It’s just sex. It’s always just sex.

It isn’t, and he knows it. He knows, too, that Harry isn’t stupid enough to fall for the act much longer. Hartley turns on the shower, lets it run, folds his glasses neatly on the sink. Over the roar of the water, he can very faintly hear Harry start to snore.

Afterwards, he dresses quietly, careful not to wake Harry — but why, he thinks, why does he have to be so concerned — and meanders back to his kitchen perch. The cigarettes and the matches are still waiting on the counter, an empty space in the pack signifying how many he’s burned through this week alone. He grimaces and lights another one. A habit he’d started under Harrison and that he continues under Harry. He slides the window open and exhales, taps the ash into the sink. His stomach rumbles. Every nerve ending is on fire. He can’t calm the tension skittering through his body. He rummages through the pantry for something to eat and settles on a handful of crackers that he can hardly even taste. 

He’s supposed to be the skilled one at unraveling the inner workings of everyone else. He’s always thought he has Harry figured out: not just his intellect or his sharp tongue or his endless wellspring of affection he reserves for Jesse and no one else, but that undercurrent of fear that had underscored so many men Hartley’s been with. They’ve all been frightened of losing control and their own stupid, foolish human frailty. All terrified of being alone and forgotten and unimportant. Hartley had always been so good at giving them that crooked smile and spinning the right words to buoy their flagging egos. If they’d paid extra or if he felt uncharacteristically kind, he’d wait on the edge of the bed, the taste of cum still in his mouth, his skin still slick and sweaty, listening, offering sympathetic banalities, watching them try to collect their broken pieces into something they could show the world again. All men, Hartley believes, are the same, all driven by that same primeval terror of inadequacy. He lights a match and pinches it out. Lights another one, pinches it out. He shakes the box and listens to the soft clicking of the matches knocking against each other. He wonders when Harry will wake up, or if he should wake him up now and take him back to the labs. He hates — does he? — that his sheets will smell like Harry in the morning, and he scrounges in the mug on the kitchen table to count his quarters for laundry. He needs to erase all traces of Harry’s presence and he needs to reduce Harry back to a warm body. It’s not as though he can call it off. Hartley fiddles with the mug, the matches, the pack of cigarettes. He won’t say it. Won’t make it real.

He falls asleep on the table, head resting on his arms, and wakes again only when he hears the scrape of a kitchen chair being pulled out from the table.

‘Comfortable,’ says Harry. He’s still flushed and damp from the shower. Hartley can only blink groggily at him. He’s not conscious enough for a witty comeback. ‘Made myself a sandwich. The provolone went bad.’

Hartley yawns in an attempt to wake himself up. ‘I’m so glad you’re making yourself at home. I’ll fetch your slippers and mix you a drink.’

‘I’m afraid we don’t have cash on my earth, or I’d leave some on your dresser,’ Harry retorts. ‘Would that make this easier for you?’

‘Oh, just put on your shoes. I’m taking you back to the labs.’ The tension is so thick Hartley thinks he’ll choke on it. He forces himself to think of all of his moments of vulnerability with Harrison and how they’d all ended. It’s a reliable source of anger, and he clings to it as best he can. All men are the same. All men are the same. All men are the same. All men are just as broken and limitlessly cruel. His only bet is to control them and manipulate them so they don’t do the same to him. He won’t let himself slide under the surface of the water. 

He busies himself with his shoes, his keys, his wallet, and peers out in the hallway to see if anyone is wandering. God, but he feels foolish, sneaking Harry down the stairs and out to the parking lot like he’s smuggling a prisoner of war. All this work for a hookup, he thinks. All these risks.

At a red light, he tightens his hold around the steering wheel until his knuckles go white. ‘Why did you kiss me?’

Harry scoffs. ‘Are you still on about that? There’s no grand meaning. I won’t do it again, if that’s what you’re so worried about.’

‘What if I asked you to?’ Stupid, stupid, stupid. The surface level of the water rising, faster and faster. The light turns green, and Hartley roars through the intersection.

‘You need to make up your mind.’

Hartley thinks about the times Harrison would kiss him, his knee nudging with almost-unbearable force between Hartley’s legs, his thumb pressed between the tendons of Hartley’s wrist, his teeth sinking into the softest part of Hartley’s lower lip until the skin split. A mark of ownership. Hartley had welcomed it. You can’t hurt me, he wants to say to Harry. No matter how under my skin you get, you’ll never find the places he found. He’s not sure if it’s true.

’I did,’ he says. ‘I asked you, didn’t I?’

In the parking lot of the labs, crookedly parked, car motor still running, Harry leans over and kisses him again, fingers splayed over Hartley’s jaw. Hartley, instinctively, reaches to wrap Harry’s hand around his throat and squeeze and only barely stops himself. He doesn’t really know how to kiss well, and so he does his best to follow Harry’s lead. The water closes over him. He grips the edge of the driver’s seat to avoid touching Harry, imagines the sunlight above him growing dimmer and dimmer the deeper he goes.

It isn’t just about sex. It isn’t. It isn’t. It isn’t.


End file.
